GROWING AND SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIPS

I work with non-profits to help them use and understand Civi and Drupal. These are such important tools for these organisations and it's great to see people using them in different and interesting ways. Using and working with Civi is made so much more fun and useful by the enthusiastic and talented community surrounding it.

Its great to work on a project that has a profound impact on non profits. I am very excited about the work we do on CiviCRM which involves building on each other's ideas to create best of breed solutions for non profits. The fact that CiviCRM is an open source project with an amazing community and dedicated developers is an icing on the cake.

CiviCRM makes it possible for non-profit organizations, even those with a limited budget, to forge strong relationships with their constituents, thus bringing them closer to fulfilling their mission. Over the years, we have seen CiviCRM develop and evolve in a very responsive way to the needs of the marketplace.

CiviCRM is helping us serve member-based community organizing groups across the
U.S. to keep better track of their events, fundraising, and membership data. It's helping our community to aim higher in terms of what kind of questions they should be asking and what kind of data they should be collecting. We chose CiviCRM because it's the best all-around tool to do what our groups need, AND because it's open source.

CiviCRM enables us and our clients to invest precious funds into configuring the CRM to meet organisational needs, and building innovative new features, rather than paying annual license fees. With access to the source code and tight integration with leading website content management systems, CiviCRM is extremely flexible.

I work for a nonprofit that helps other nonprofits with web and graphic design, and CiviCRM is a major help to the small-medium groups we typically work with who need high-end CRM functionality that is deeply embedded in their websites.

Recent blog posts

Some of you may have heard of CiviTeacher and watched some of the great training videos available on the site. I think it's an excellent resource that walks you through different CiviCRM tasks and features. It gives you access to easy to digest, short videos, which will help you to make the most of CiviCRM. The videos also share best practices and lessons learned that will save you time and headaches by helping you to set up things correctly in CiviCRM. I thought it would be great to know more about CiviTeacher and Stuart Gaston, who started CiviTeacher, so I emailed him to see if he would like to do a blog interview. Have more questions about CiviTeacher? Feel free to comment to share your questions.

For the past 2 years, the last Wednesday of each January has been earmarked for CiviDay, a worldwide effort to come together and promote all things CiviCRM. This year, CiviDay witnessed 26 events, from virtual meetups to all day affairs, across 13 countries, bringing together newbies and veterans alike to share stories and to learn about CiviCRM and what it can do for organizations everywhere.

Spark Inside is an innovative new charity supporting young people in the criminal justice system to create more meaningful and productive futures through professional life coaching. Our pilot program was met with significant success; an independent evaluation of our one-to-one coaching program with 8 teenage boys leaving prison showed that one year after they had been released, the re-offending rate was 12.5%, compared to the national average of 70%. This year, we expect to offer coaching to 200 young people in prison.

As a follow up to the CiviVolunteer Tips & Tricks webinar, we are scheduling a Ask the Experts Q&A Chat where we can dive into your questions about how to use CiviVolunteer to manage volunteer activities.

CiviCon Denver (and all the events taking place around the conference) will take place the week of April 20th. The marketing team needs your help to promote this event. We are launching a social media campaign and its success depends heavily on your involvement.

This post is the first in a series that will present results from the CiviCRM statistics project. It will focus on better framing the organizations that use CiviCRM. Further posts will explore the technologies used to run CiviCRM, the software development process, the CiviCRM community and communications, and lift the hood on how our statistics are created and processed.